My Life in Paper

My focus was to try and create objects that were significant in my life. Most of my life is spent in the mountains, hiking, camping and kayaking or canoeing around. That being said, my first object was a canoe.  It took some time to recall all the commands to loft, boolean, and merge shapes, but eventually, I got the hang of it. Making a curvilinear shape was proving to be a problem, so I instead made it in triangular forms.

Next, I wanted to challenge myself in making something curvilinear since I realized that a lot of my favourite objects were circular. I played with various tools and commands until I found the right workflow to unfold circular forms. I decided to create my dog's favourite toy, which was a stuffed pig since he is my most cherished friend.

What I realized early on was that the Rotate3d tool was not as useful in unfolding circular forms, so I tinkered and found the Unroll srf command, which helped a lot. The boolean difference and loft tool were my favourite commands in this design. As well I used the slice and smash command, that proved effective at creating planer surfaces from curves and circles.

I finally felt comfortable with all the tools that I decided to make something with polygons and triangles that would unfold practically. I chose to make a Christmas tree since it is one of my favourite holidays. I realized that unfolding it as one singular form would not be realistic once the actual construction was in place. I split it into four pieces and then began placing tabs on the ones that would require for attachments.

Once I got comfortable with my workflow and deciding what piece to create first to continue to use the same command continuously, it was going very quickly, and the design began to be second nature.

Finally, I decided to challenge myself and make something complex and layered, I chose my engagement ring since it was custom made, I wanted to understand the steps to recreating it. I didn't have time to create the whole ring so I focused on the middle setting and stones.